Collaborative Exploration of 3D Scientific Data

International audienceThis demonstration introduces new ways for exploring Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) that contain 3D scientific data sets obtained by simulation. In order to make decisions accordingly to their collective knowledge and understanding of the simulation, the users must collaborate and share experiences and comments. We provide tools to enable a good coordination between the users, and to make each user aware of the activity of others. Each user can navigate within the CVE: change her own position, orientation and scale. Each user can also add annotations within the virtual universe. We propose several 3D layouts for the presentation of the data, associated with different 3D navigation tools. Consequently, the user can explore the data accoording to various parameters such as time or temperature. Last we propose a new 3D interaction tool, called 2D Cursor / 3D Pointer, dedicated to selection and manipulation of 3D objects, and application control. This 2D cursor is associated with a 3D geometry in order to make people aware of the activity of the users who are using this tool